Dive Brief:
- A White firefighter for the city of Chicago failed to show his Black supervisor deprived him of higher-paying driving assignments because of his race, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held (Stieglitz v. City of Chicago, No. 21-2784 (7th Cir. July 12, 2022)).
- When the firefighter took an assignment driving a fire truck, he thought he’d be the truck’s only driver — a role that paid more, according to the court. But his captain, who is Black, hired two Black firefighters to rotate driving with him, limiting what he could earn. He filed a race discrimination complaint with the city. During its investigation, the city mistakenly determined that he wasn’t properly certified to drive and temporarily suspended him. He sued the city for race discrimination and retaliation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
- The 7th Circuit upheld summary judgment for the city. The firefighter was convinced the captain hired the two Black drivers out of racial favoritism, the panel noted. But he didn’t present any evidence to support this, and he needed “more than a personal belief ... to create a factual dispute over whether he was the victim of race discrimination,” the court explained.
Dive Insight:
The case speaks to a common basis for discrimination claims: when employees perceive that a supervisor or manager favors one protected class over another. The ruling offers several takeaways for employers.
Notably, employers that curb discriminatory comments and behavior, particularly from decision-makers, stand a better chance of defeating discrimination claims. Here, there was no evidence the captain “ever mentioned race or disparaged White people, or had a history of favoritism toward non-Whites,” the 7th Circuit said.
Second, courts aren’t likely to interfere with a manager’s day-to-day decisions, such as scheduling or job assignments, so long as the decisions are reasonable and nondiscriminatory. The firefighter argued that using driver rotation systems was “sufficiently idiosyncratic to be ‘fishy’” and suggest race discrimination against the White firefighter. The 7th Circuit disagreed. Even if driver rotations are unusual, which the city disputed, the firefighter didn’t explain how letting fire captains decide who to distribute driving duties to indicated race discrimination, the court pointed out.
In addition, the captain provided a reasonable explanation for his actions. He said that rotating drivers was consistent with his own training, gave him flexibility with scheduling and ensured firefighters learned local geography and obtained driving experience. He wasn’t required to share this reasoning with subordinates, and his decision not to do so didn’t suggest his reasons were false or pretextual, the 7th Circuit said.
The retaliation claim failed because there was no evidence tying the firefighter’s discrimination complaint to his suspension several months later, the panel held. He was suspended because an investigator mistakenly determined that he wasn’t certified to drive the truck under a new rule. But the city quickly removed the suspension after officials realized he’d been grandfathered in under the old rule, the court noted.
That’s the third takeaway. “Perhaps those officials should have checked before ordering the suspension, but to the extent they handled the situation poorly, their error was promptly corrected,” the 7th Circuit said. “This does not suggest a retaliatory agenda.”
